Deceptive sexual behaviours can take different forms. They might involve infidelity and deception about sexual relationships with other people. They might consist of hiding addictions and compulsive behaviours, such as a pornography addiction or compulsive sexual behaviours. This could include cyber sex or real-life interactions.
Whatever form they take, deceptive sexual behaviours can rock the family system. Mistrust and betrayal between partners ripple across different family structures, impacting parent-child relationships and children’s well-being. Parents may also lie directly to their children to hide what’s going on.
This blog explores the impact of deceptive sexual behaviours on the family system, and how therapy can support families to rescript their relations and recover together.
How Do Deceptive Sexual Behaviours Affect Partners?
Deceptive sexual behaviours can cause deep feelings of betrayal, mistrust, disappointment, shame, and hurt between partners. They can lead to tensions and conflicts or the breakdown of communication. In some cases, deceptive sexual behaviours are experienced as unfolding traumatic events by the other partner, known as betrayal trauma.
Betrayal trauma happens when people or institutions that we depend upon for survival harm or abuse us in some way. They occur when someone breaks a social agreement, leading to a breakdown of trust and feelings of betrayal. However, when we are in a dependent relationship, it can be hard to confront or leave the person causing harm. Without this accountability, the betrayal can cause even more serious damage.
Betrayal traumas often don’t involve a threat to life or physical harm. But they can damage a person’s self-concept and beliefs about the world. Betrayal trauma can break apart our perceptions of other people as trustworthy and well-intending, and make us question other parts of our lives and experiences.
Research has found that traumas involving betrayal are linked to physical illness, anxiety, depression, and dissociation.
Omar Minwalla’s Blueprint for Deceptive Sexuality
In his work, Ten Steps to Building a Secret Sexual Basement, Omar Minwalla describes the complexity of the manipulation and deception that develops from sexual behaviours that violate the agreements of a relationship. Behaviours that begin as sexual transgressions often transform into a sustained pattern of psychological manipulation and relational harm, as a concealed reality is built beneath the relationship that warps the reality of everyone involved.
Importantly, the true harm of sexual deception isn’t the behaviours themselves, but the deliberate construction and maintenance of a hidden life. This distorts the partner’s perception of truth, causing intensifying psychological, emotional, and relational trauma.
How Do Deceptive Behaviours and Betrayal Trauma Impact the Family?
All forms of deceptive sexual behaviours shake the family system. But their impact on family members and relationships -particularly children and parent-child relationships- might look a bit different depending on the kind of deceptive behaviour a parent engages in.
Understanding the Family System
We can understand families as systems, where the well-being and behaviours of each family member affect all other family members, the relationships between family members and the family system as a whole. A family’s structure and organisation also have a big impact on the way family members think, feel, and act.
Family systems theory can help us to understand how the family is impacted after events like deceptive sexual behaviours: how these events affect individual family members and the way a family functions. These insights can help families reorganise and recover after family trauma and protect family members from further harm as trauma unfolds.
The Impact of Parental Affairs on Children
One of the most well-known types of deceptive sexual behaviours is parental affairs. Parental affairs often involve repeated dishonesty and secrecy that persists over months or even years. The consequences of a parental affair are felt by partners, children, and the family system as a whole.
The impact of a parental affair on children can vary a lot between families. Research suggests it’s linked to age, gender, and culture, as well as individual characteristics of children and the family.
A child’s cognitive and emotional development influences the way they respond to a parental affair, as do the characteristics of parent-child relationships.
Blame and Responsibility
Younger children are especially likely to blame themselves for the conflict and discord that follows parental affairs. They tend to think that their thoughts and actions have a bigger impact on the world around them than in reality do. So when something difficult happens within the family, they can think that they are somehow the cause of it.
Fear and Neglect
Navigating the emotional harm caused by betrayal trauma and the conflicts of a parental affair can take huge amounts of time and energy from parents. This can make it hard to continue giving children the attention and time they need.
When parents struggle to meet children’s emotional or physical needs, children can experience fear and neglect. This can be particularly traumatic for younger children who fully depend on their parents, and may be experienced as a threat to their own survival.
Parentification and Role-Reversal
Older adolescents can sometimes take on a caring role for the parent who has been harmed by the affair. This can lead to processes of role-reversal and parentification, when children take on roles that are beyond their developmental stage. These processes can disrupt normal emotional and social development.
The Effects of Compulsive Sexual Behaviours on Children
Like other types of addictions and compulsions, compulsive sexual behaviours usually involve some degree of secrecy. The parent engaging in these behaviours tries to hide their actions from their partner and children. This can lead to a breakdown of trust between partners and in child-parent relationships.
A 2010 study looked into the effects of compulsive cybersexual behaviours on the family, asking parents how cybersex addiction had impacted their children. They described how:
- Children had lost time with their parents
- Children had seen their parents arguing and experienced stress in their home
- Children had seen some of the pornography, and it had been harmful to their well-being
Conflict and Tension at Home
Deceptive and compulsive sexual behaviours can rupture the family system and home environment, causing conflict and tension in different aspects of family life. Exposure to such hostility and stress can impact young people’s mental health.
Research has found that hostile conflicts between parents are linked to distress, low self-esteem, and other mental health symptoms among young people. Teenagers experiencing family conflicts in high school are more likely to have mental health problems in young adulthood.
Attachment, Attention, and Development
As with parental affairs, the emotional burden of handling a partner’s compulsive sexual behaviours can take parents’ time and energy away from their children. This can lead to the development of insecure attachments between children and caregivers, leaving young people without trusting relationships through which they can learn emotional and social skills.
Insecure attachment relationships in childhood have been linked to mental health symptoms among young people, including eating disorders, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder.
Parental Lying and Parent-Child Relationships
When a parent engages in deceptive sexual behaviours, it involves secrecy around children as well as their partner. Parents may lie to young people to try to hide their behaviours or to shield them from what’s going on.
Research shows that parental lying can harm parent-child relationships and is associated with more negative parenting practices. More parental lying is linked to less parental involvement, warmth, and autonomy support. It’s also connected to lower trust in parents, parent-child alienation, and worse communication.
Deceptive Sexual Behaviours and the Family System
When family systems are well-functioning, they maintain appropriate boundaries. These boundaries guide the interactions between family members and shape the roles each family member takes. But when events and trauma shake the family system, unhealthy boundaries can be created that perpetuate the harm that family members experience.
For example, when one parent engages in deceptive sexual behaviours, it can lead to a breakdown in trust, affection, and communication between parents. They may instead turn to their children to support, putting them in roles and positions that are outside of their developmental capacities.
These relationships and roles can cause further distress and harm.
Understanding Therapy as a Tool for Family System Recovery
The way that a family is structured affects its resilience to events like deceptive sexual behaviours and parental affairs. Families with too rigid boundaries may be more likely to withhold information from children, intensifying distance and mistrust. Those with diffused boundaries may be more vulnerable to processes like role reversal and parentification.
On the other hand, families with appropriate boundaries may be better placed to prevent the harm from deceptive sexual behaviours from permeating throughout the family system.
Equally, supporting families to reorganise and restructure after a rupture is a key part of a family’s recovery. When these behaviours result in separation, families can find structures that enable them to work together again despite fundamental changes in the family system. In other cases, restructuring may involve identifying harmful ways of relating that developed after, or even before, these events, and replacing them with more positive ones.
Family therapists can be an invaluable support in this process. Families may attend sessions altogether, or in different sub-systems. It’s often helpful for parents to participate in some sessions by themselves.
Family and parenting interventions may include:
- Family systems therapy
- Psychoeducation
- Family behavioural therapy
- Parenting skills training
Prioritising Children and Adolescents
In the context of deceptive sexual behaviours, the needs of children and adolescents are often overlooked. However, experiences of family conflict and trauma can have a lasting impact on young people’s mental health.
As well as working with the entire family, it’s often also important for therapists to work with young people individually. Therapists can support young people to develop healthy coping mechanisms, be aware of harmful role-modelling, and recover from mental health symptoms.
Treatment modalities for children and adolescents may include:
- Interpersonal therapy
- Cognitive-behavioural therapy
- Counseling
- Creative arts therapy
- Somatic experiencing
The Wave Clinic: Specialised Recovery Programs for Young People and Families
The Wave Clinic offers transformative recovery programs for young people and families. We provide specialist mental health support to families recovering from family trauma and other events that harm the family system.
Alongside specialist recovery support for young people, we offer parenting and family intensives for families who have experienced infidelity, compulsive sexual behaviours, and separation or divorce. These fourteen or twenty-one-day programs combine the lessons of months of outpatient therapy into a few weeks. We support parents to move back into their parenting role, look at the role of intergenerational trauma, restructure family dynamics, and teach families the skills they require to support a young person’s recovery.
Our parenting and family intensives also include opportunities for learning by doing, creating new ways of relating through enriching experiences and incredible memories.
Fiona Yassin is DSTT (Deceptive Sexuality and Trauma Treatment) trained by Dr Minwalla, applying the most specialised, up-to-date medical theory and practice to every family’s program.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our programs, get in touch today.
